Hey, this is keen! I just made the Forbes Web Celebs 25 for the second year in a row! I’m in great company — two of my Boing Boing co-editors, Mark Frauenfelder and Xeni Jardin, are also on the list!

Cory Doctorow is a prominent activist for digital rights, and serves as a fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He’s one of the editors of Boing Boing, a hugely influential and popular blog about technology, culture and politics. And he’s also a science fiction novelist, particularly famous on the Web, where he gives his novels away for free (For more, see his essay, ” Giving It Away.”) In 2007, Doctorow raised his profile with a new short story collection, Overclocked, numerous columns and articles around the Web (including on Forbes.com) and participation in Boing Boing’s new podcasts and videocasts.

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The fan-translations for Scroogled (my Creative Commons-licensed story from Radar Magazine in which I ponder “the day Google became evil”) keep on rolling in — this week, there’s been two Italian translations (one from Reginazabo, the other from Decio Biavati), a Portuguese one from Carlos Martins, and a Latvian translation from the Bar Camp Baltics folks. (Previous translations include Buglarian, Dutch, French, German, Macedonian, Persian, Polish, Russian and Spanish).

As an added bonus, the Italian magazine Delos Science Fiction has just posted Stefano Bonora’s Creative Commons-licensed translation of my award-winning story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.

It’s great to see such an emergent community of translators who are using their linguistic skills to make English-only works available in other parts of the world. I’ve done some amateur translation from Spanish, but it’s hard to keep the motivation up when you’re only working for yourself (as is necessarily the case when you’re working with traditional copyright). The “derivatives-friendly” Creative Commons licenses allow amateur translators to share the fruits of their work, get friendly feedback, collaborate and gain reputation, encouraging them to do more and more work.

Now, if only more non-English works would be translated for us Anglos! Everywhere I go, I meet non-English-speakers who’ve read English writers in translation, as well as French, German, Russian, Japanese, etc — lots of stuff gets translated out of English, but precious little comes to us, leaving us monolinguals with no choice but to live the provincial life of someone who can’t compare their native literature to those of other lands.

Link to Scroogled in Italian (Reginazabo),
Link to Scroogled in Italian (Decio Biavati),
Link to Scroogled in Portuguese,

Link to Scroogled in Latvian

Other Scroogled translations

Link to When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth in Italian

My latest Guardian column, “Downloads give Amazon jungle fever,” asks the question: how can a company that gets online selling so right get downloads so wrong?

As a consumer advocate and activist, I’m delighted by almost every public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author’s Guild tried to get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, “when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this.”

More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who’d gone on an illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS! TERRORISTS!) and asked Amazon to turn over the purchasing history of 24,000 Amazon customers. The company spent a fortune fighting for our rights, and won.

It also has a well-deserved reputation for taking care over copyright “takedown” notices for the material that its customers post on its site, discarding ridiculous claims rather than blindly acting on every single notice, no matter how frivolous.

But for all that, it has to be said: Whenever Amazon tries to sell a digital download, it turns into one of the dumbest companies on the web.

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Peter Anderson’s written a fanfic homage to my story Printcrime, called “The Copper Responds” — in it, Peter retells the story from the policeman’s point of view. It’s a fascinating exercise — Peter even kept to the same number of paragraphs as Printcrime!

Coppers, they called us, at first for the color of the buttons that gleamed down the chests of our navy blue uniforms, but later for the way we always made them cop to their crimes. In time we adopted the name for ourselves. And cop they did – they always confessed. Some pleaded innocence at first, but after only a few minutes inside the interrogation room they’d confess to anything, just to make it stop. We probably could have detained most of them anyway, locked them up indefinitely, but a formal confession made their guilt official, neat and tidy and impervious to any attorney who might get involved, not that many attorneys ever did.

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The Italian magazine Delos Science Fiction has published Stefano Bonora’s Creative Common-licensed translation of my story When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth, under the title “Quando i sistemisti domineranno la Terra.”

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